Tasmania’s hard-fought admission into the AFL competition as the 19th team came at considerable cost to the state.
For Royce Hart, Richmond’s four-time premiership great and one of Tasmania’s foremost football legends, that price – building a new $715 million stadium with a roof on a unique waterfront site at Macquarie Point – was a bargain for Tasmania.
Former Richmond champion Royce Hart near the site of the proposed new Hobart stadium.Credit: Matthew Newton
“I reckon if they handle it right, it will be a talking point like the Sydney Opera House,” says Hart, who lives opposite, on the other side of the bridge that crosses the mouth of the Derwent River.
Hart, who returned from Melbourne to Tasmania in the mid-1980s and has lately battled injuries from a car accident, described Macquarie Point – a semi-industrial site right on the edge of Hobart’s CBD – as “the best piece of land in Australia”.
Bob Brown, another Tassie icon who fought in an entirely different field, shares Hart’s view that Macquarie Point is a special site. But the famed environmental campaigner and Greens founder sees the erection of a stadium there as “a massive intrusion”.
“The city sitting there between the mountain and the river is what the soul of Hobart is,” says Brown, who supports a Tasmanian team in the AFL but believes the stadium should be elsewhere.
“It would be tough to call it a carbuncle, but it is a spoiler of that relationship, that natural relationship.″
Like Hart, Brown ends up thinking of Sydney, but coming to the opposite conclusion. “It’s Tasmania’s Bennelong Point. Sydney gets an opera house, a unique opera house … we get an also-ran, one of thousands of stadiums around the world.”
His case against the Macquarie Point stadium goes further, his argument similar to that set out by author Richard Flanagan and a considerable body of locals – that the hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money can hardly be afforded in a poorer state with a public health crisis and “a struggle to get people housing”. Hobart has some of the highest rents in Australia, in part due to its popularity with mainland investors.
Consequently, there are Tasmanians living in tents within or around the city’s centre, as I saw first-hand in the park at the back of the Hamlet cafe on Molle Street, where two tents, one caravan-sized, were nestled among the trees in the cold of Thursday night.
‘Sydney gets an opera house, a unique opera house … we get an also-ran.’
Bob Brown
Just as greater Hobart is riven by a stunning river, Tasmania is divided. Not on the merits of an AFL team – which has near-universal support and gives local footy clubs hope of a grassroots revival – but on Macquarie Point’s suitability and expense, in a state where opposition to major projects that threaten environmental and/or cultural heritage seems as ingrained in the Tasmanian psyche as football itself.
If the forces against the stadium – as distinct from the celebrated introduction of the Tassie team – are diverse (the mayor of Hobart, the state ALP leadership, Senator Jacqui Lambie and federal Liberal MP Bridget Archer all oppose the stadium), Brown’s intervention places Macquarie Point in a long line of Tasmanian struggles against developments such as the Franklin Dam, the Wesley Vale pulp mill, the flooding of Lake Pedder for a hydroelectric power station and the Gunns woodchip mill.
But whereas the environmental cause won its battles over the Franklin, Wesley Vale and Gunns, the AFL’s stadium – which has an urban setting – has been presented as a fait accompli, with contracts signed by AFL chief Gillon McLachlan and Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff before Wednesday’s announcement. It does not seem likely to be overturned.
AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan at the announcement of the new team and stadium.Credit: Getty Images
“The difference between the Franklin campaign and this one is we had seven years to take on saving the Franklin,” says Brown. “This stadium has been dumped on half a million Tasmanians with almost no consultation.
“I’m very surprised that the Albanese government did zero public consultation on this.”
The AFL’s view, as put forth by McLachlan – whose landing of a Tasmanian team and stadium represents a curtain call on the football stage – is that it will bring a buzz and economic benefits to the state and Hobart CBD, and will be accepted once the team is ensconced.
“This is not new – people don’t like change until it happens, and then it has plenty of parents,” McLachlan told me on Wednesday, comparing the local opposition to a similar initial outcry in South Australia over the Adelaide Oval redevelopment.
In conversations with Hobartians working in bars, hotels, construction and, not least, local football officials who care deeply about the game, I did not hear a single complaint about the team, but the stadium was a very different matter.
“I don’t know anyone who opposes Tassie being in the AFL,” says Peter Fish, president of Scottsdale Football Club, an iconic club in the state’s north which no longer fields an under-18 team due to a drop-off in that demographic. “But I know plenty who have real concerns over the need for a new stadium.”
McLachlan persuaded not only the Tasmanian Liberal government to part with $460 million but the federal Labor government to cough up $240 million, with the AFL contributing only $15 million – “a pittance” as Brown puts it, though the league is investing $360 million in Tassie football, counting the new team – favoured to be called the Tasmanian Devils, despite Warner Brothers’ purported ownership of that trademark – and local footy.
The AFL, in effect, made the stadium a precondition of Tasmania’s entry to the AFL and AFLW. To some local critics, the Albanese and Rockliff governments capitulated to the AFL’s demand, sacrificing a site that might have hosted a cultural centre, with a truth and reconciliation centre at its heart, a recent proposal that has been swept away by the stadium deal.
On Thursday, The Age went to the stadium site and found a large bitumen area, surrounded by faded warehouses and with a sewage plant as a background, waterfront behind on one side, a war memorial towering above on the other.
“I think it should be a cultural centre, and you begin with the first culture,” says Brown, arguing the new team’s stadium would be better situated in Launceston, where the state and federal governments are spending $130 million on an upgrade to University of Tasmania stadium (Hawthorn’s second home), or in the northern suburbs of Hobart. Either option would make it easier for northern Tasmanians to access, he says.
“Has Geelong got two football stadiums? What’s going on here?” he asks.
The north-south conflict within Tasmania – the population is close to equal in the two halves of the state and they have long fought for their respective footy and political interests – has meant that the AFL plans just seven games at Macquarie Point and four in Launceston for an indefinite period as a compromise; the hope of the Tasmanian government and the AFL is that the stadium will also host concerts and other events.
WHILE the stadium has become a socio-political football, the new team’s birth, scheduled for 2028, is widely viewed as a panacea for Tasmanian football and potentially the most consequential arrival since David Walsh, an eccentric Tasmanian who made millions via a gambling algorithm before founding MONA just outside Hobart, an art-quake that spawned spin-offs in the innovative Dark Mofo and Summer Mofo festivals.
If Hobart’s reinvention as an arts-friendly small city suggests a new cosmopolitanism that made the city and state more attractive and thus expensive, Dark Mofo’s artistic director Leigh Carmichael believes the Tasmanian team’s impact can be as profound.
“It’s huge,” says Carmichael, who grew up in the Huon Valley and worked at MONA before taking over Dark Mofo. “It potentially will have an even broader appeal [than MONA].” He rejects the notion that footy is at odds with the arts, saying their audiences cross over more than is commonly understood.
Carmichael had first hoped for a cultural centre, having input into a 2016 proposal (including the aforementioned Truth and Reconciliation Art Park) with MONA and Tasmanian Indigenous writer and academic Greg Lehman.
But that proposal stalled and a luxury real estate venture was announced in 2021. Carmichael has become an advocate for the stadium. Tasmania and Hobart, he says, need “to grab it with both hands”.
“I think it would be a huge shame if we don’t spend enough money to do it well,” he adds.
IN HOBART’S north, in a scenic field nestled in suburbia just beneath Kunanyi, hitherto Mount Wellington, the Glenorchy Magpies train in floodlit twilight on a Thursday evening.
The club’s president Peter Barwick, wearing an All Blacks windcheater, fervently hopes that the Tasmanian AFL team will bring about the revival of Tassie football. Indeed, his predecessor at Glenorchy, John McCann, reckoned the new team could become Australian football’s answer to the All Blacks.
Barwick’s Magpies, winners of 32 premierships in local competitions including the statewide Tasmanian Football League and (now) Tasmanian State League (south only), provided 35 players to the VFL/AFL; legends Peter Hudson and Roy “Up There” Cazaly coached Glenorchy, as did Collingwood’s Billy Picken.
Glenorchy, though, has insufficient players to field a reserves team, with the result that they send surplus senior team players to nearby New Norfolk in a lower-level competition.
“Footy has become not the high-profile game of choice in the state,” says Barwick, whose daughter Brooke, 17, was on the front page of Hobart’s newspaper, The Mercury, alongside Richmond’s Jack Riewoldt, as one of Tassie’s best AFLW prospects.
Barwick, noting that the sewerage towers next to Macquarie Point will need to be relocated – a massive further cost Tasmanian Water and Sewerage will have to bear – nonetheless supports the new stadium.
“I think footy has done well to get it.”
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